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How-To Geek

Have you ever wondered where the websites you visit send your information? Well, if you have, read on to find out about this new extension from Mozilla that will tell you how you are tracked across websites.

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Installing Collusion

We will be using Collusion to automatically track and link-up related cookies, to install it head over to the Collusion website and click on the download button.

This will take you to the Collusion page in the Firefox add-ons gallery, where you can click on the add to Firefox button.

You will then have to confirm that you want to install the add-on by clicking the Install Now button.

Once installed, when you visit a website you will see a small red and white button in the right-hand corner of the add-on bar.

If you click on it, Collusion will open up and give you an overview of which websites have tracked you, and link websites using the same trackers in a spider diagram like fashion.

The sites that you have visited directly will have a blue glow surrounding them, to see where a website that you have visited has sent your data, simply hover over it. Below we can see that 9gag sent cookies to 4 third-party websites.

To get more detailed information about the websites your information was sent to, click on the website you visited, a menu will appear on the left hand side where you will be able to see the specific URL’s that information was sent to.

You should be aware that not all cookies are tracking you however, they are used for a number of things. If you wish to find out more about cookies and other tracking methods check out this post.

This might be great for FireFox if you use firefox. I use chrome and IE, I have Do not Track Plus on both and it works well. It blocks the sites from tracking you. This just tells your being tracked, It doesnt stop it….. Do Not Track Plus does…….

Collusion is a “nice to have” utility. The major problem with Collusion is that, with all the supposed information provided, how can any user of Collusion stop the tracking? There are no options available to really stop the tracking. There are some addons, extension, etc., available .. such as Do Not Track Plus … but does not stop “all” the tracking. There is no such thing as anonymity on the Internet! And, as with anything else, if you don’t want anyone to see do not access the Internet!

I’m running chrome and I use the AVG Do Not Track-tool to see and block the trackers. So those who do not use Mozilla might want to give it a try. As I’ve heard google themselves are among those who want to track everyone since they’ve refused to implement the Do-not-track meta-tag as mozilla have (or at least that’s what I’ve heard) so I was actually surprised that AVG do-not-track tool could be installed on chrome (but whether it works or not I cannot tell at least it’s telling me that it’s blocking the trackers I want it to block)

Interestingly if you search available add-ons from the firefox add-ons page for DO NOT TRACK PLUS, it cannot find it.
But if you do a google search, it comes up with the add-ons page for DO NOT TRACK PLUS, which is a Mozilla featured add-on.
Odd behaviour.